Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Skyscraper construction speed by city

Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.

Here’s how he went about that:

  • He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia
  • He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area
  • The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada
  • Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts

Here are the results:

And here’s one thing he had to say about them:

Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn’t the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.

For a lot more information on this topic, click here.